Tackling Neo-Nazi rise in post-Soviet era
Published: 22 April, 2009, 01:20
Edited: 07 October, 2009, 16:01
Former veterans of the Latvian Legion, a force that was part of the Nazi German Waffen SS, walk with relatives to the Monument of Freedom as part of an annual commemoration in Riga (AFP Photo / Ilmars Znotins)
(12.7Mb) embed videoRussian politicians are looking at measures to combat the rise in Neo-Nazi sympathizers across former Soviet states.
In recent years, events organised by fascists have led to violence and vandalism. To mention just few of them: SS veterans' parades in Latvia; the appearance of billboards in Ukraine commemorating its Nazi World War II divisions; the relocation of a monument to those who died fighting Nazi troops in Estonia, along with the remains of Soviet soldiers.
Maksim Reva is a member of the Estonian Night Watch movement set up to protect the monument.
“These people are trying to forget that Nazi concentration camps existed and that there was a horrible war,” Maksim says.
He was among the many ethnic Russians who protested against the monument’s relocation in Tallinn.
After the Bronze Soldier's statue was removed, more than 200 people were arrested during protests and one demonstrator died.
The risk of pro-Nazi revisionism has led to the establishment of an expert working group in the Russian Duma to draft new laws banning any type of rehabilitation or glorification of fascism.
The new draft law being discussed by the State Duma is aimed at condemning the rehabilitation of Nazism in post-Soviet states, including Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia.
“In Ukraine and the Baltic States, we're not only seeing a social campaign to rehabilitate Nazism, but a state campaign as well. We have to react on a state level. Russia can't be partners with states which are trying to rehabilitate Nazism,” said Kirill Frolov from the Institute of CIS countries.
The working group is made up of historians, experts, lawyers and Duma deputies.
They're recommending the creation of a new public body that will hunt down those involved in the rehabilitation of Nazism in post-Soviet states.
They also want new criminal laws with up to five years in jail for those found guilty of rehabilitating Nazism.
But how will this be applied to foreign citizens, especially high-ranking officials?
“If a foreigner is acting to rehabilitate Nazism on our territory, we would be able to start a criminal case. If it's a politician, he should understand he could face trial in Russia after his term is over,” says State Duma deputy Konstantin Zatulin.
Holocaust denial is explicitly or implicitly illegal in 13 countries: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland.
But there are no specific laws against the rehabilitation of fascism in Russia.
And before this draft law is reviewed by deputies, its promoters plan to publish it on the internet so that ordinary people in all post-Soviet states can voice their views on whether or not it is necessary.
Within the EU, Holocaust denial is not prohibited outright but “denying or grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes” is fraught with a maximum term of three years in jail.
More than 20 million Soviet people died fighting the Nazis in the Second World War, and almost every family was affected.
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There is no re-birth of Nazi in Baltic states! All public activities are based on collective memory of Soviet occupation. For post-Soviet states, for example, the Victory Day in May 9 does not mean the joy and happiness because for Baltics a new occupation started - the Red Terror of the Soviet Union. Russians may held them as heroes but for occupied states they were occupants. How an independent state can be happy that the Soviet Union do no respect sovereignty and occupy it?
Anyone who has any first-hand experience of Estonia knows that it is just nonsense to claim, as the article does, that there is some campaign there to “rehabilitate Nazism” there. You can’t “rehabilitate” something that was never in vogue in the first place. To Estonians, Nazism was a hated and oppressive ideology of totalitarian German occupation from the very beginning, just as Communism was a hated and oppressive ideology of totalitarian Soviet occupation. It just happens that by any objective measure, the Soviet occupation of Estonia was much more murderous and destructive than the Nazi occupation. So when Soviet forces were returning late in the War to resume their killings, arrests, torture and mass deportations of 1940-41, some Estonians fought alongside their existing German occupants to try to hinder the return of the even more deadly Soviet oppressors. They did this not because they were Nazis themselves, much less in the war interests of a moustachioed maniac holed up in his Berlin bunker. They did it to prevent the return of horrible suffering to their devastated homeland at the hands of the Soviets which they had already experienced in 1940-41, hoping that their efforts might prevent the return of Soviets bevorel the War ended. They failed in this, their country was occupied by the Red Army again for almost another fifty years, and unbridled Soviet terror against their civilian population resumed. Just as no one fought for Nazism back then, no one celebrates Nazism today through commemorating Estonians’ resistance to the Soviets. Nor does the removal of the Bronze Soldier monument, which Stalin erected in downtown Tallinn at the height of post-war Soviet terror against the Estonian population, represent any praise of Nazism; it represents a denunciation of Sovietism. It is long past time that the truly offensive assertions to the contrary, such as conveyed by the above article, stopped.
When the partizans claimed to be attendants of the red army, the first line that held for the red army counter attack, then no one was interested in what they had to say. when yugoslavia was in war russia turned a blind eye to its favored nationality. People in Moscow forget how many millions of people from central asian countries that end in -stan died in WW2. They forget Moscow is still there because of the enitre ussr not just slavs fought as civilians against a superior force and did not run. Russia doesn't create any sense of brotherhood with former soviet states as it used too. So even in Russia the culture now is so weak and pathetic even moscow natives are waving nazi ensignas. Where is the old fervor and unity, maybe speaking russian isn't as important as feeling a true belonging to ussr. Revive cultural success and build on it. Give something better than race, nationality, and religon to cling to for identity. Create a culture for your poor and not your neo-czarist bastard oligarchs. Russia is to blame for all the progeny of nazi cult in russia and outside of it. MAybe China could give you some pointers on how countries should be run.